In a yellow envelope with very large black letters the phrase was read: "leaders have to be optimistic." It was a promotion of a conference by a well-known American politician, currently a consultant and business speaker.
We continue with the recipes, I told myself with a forced smile. I do not agree very much with these types of statements that are based on absolutisms that deny pieces of the human being. Opposites exist and must be recognized and integrated, not denied, not repressed. The opposites complement each other.
I consider leadership to be a chosen way of life, not a technique or mental programming, much less the result of behavior based exclusively on voluntarism. It is, from my perception and experience, a personal decision to be the protagonist of one's life. It is a long road with no end, with innumerable endings and beginnings. A succession of deaths and births. We are abandoning old beliefs and adopting others that with time, perhaps, will be abandoned again.
It is, I insist that from my point of view, the acceptance of optimism as part of a whole in which pessimism exists. The one without the other has no existence. Something like light and dark, good and evil. "You have to be good," they used to tell us at home when we were children.
It is a conscious attitude, also recognizing the existence of that which obscures the illusory brilliance of an optimism that may not be able to sustain itself in the facts.
History, universal and local, is full of optimistic leaders who at the same time (when we consider social history, all times are short) became fuel for critics and adversaries. There are even many who disparagingly refer to them as "those loose crazy people." In these moments Nelson Mandela and his HUGE leadership journey comes to mind. To have, you have to do and to do, you must inevitably BE.
Accessing our optimism without acknowledging our pessimism can be ineffective. It is not something that we can achieve without going through our inner paths to discover who we are. This, precisely, has to do with being able to be a leader of oneself. Once this, not before, we can venture to lead others.
In a prison there were several inmates breaking stones. When asked what they were doing, they all complained: "Here I am, chipping stones…". One of them replied: "I am building churches." Piece of difference, huh?
My connection with optimism is very great. I am convinced that if organizations, public and private, motivate the personal leadership of their members, our world will be much more habitable than the current one, in which optimistic leaders supposedly abound…
